Saint Death - John Milton #3 by Mark Dawson Page B

no-one that she could monitor for signs of contact. She clicked over into the data management system and calibrated a new set of “selectors”, filters that would be applied to internet traffic and telephony in order to trigger flags.
    She started with his name, the nub of information around which everything else would be woven. She added his age––five years either way––and then the names of his parents, his aunt and uncle. She ran a search on the soldiers who shared record entries with him, applied a simple algorithm to disqualify those who only appeared once or twice, then pasted the names of the rest. She inputted credit card and bank account details, known telephone numbers and email addresses. He hadn’t had a registered address since he had left the Army, but she posted what she had and all the hotels that he had visited more than once.
    His blood group, DNA profile and fingerprints had been taken when he joined the Group and, miraculously, she had those. She dragged each of them across the screen and dropped them in as new selectors.
    Distinguishing marks: a tattoo on his back, a large pair of angel wings; a scar down his face, the memento of a knife fight in a Honolulu bar; a scar from the surgery to put a steel plate in his right leg after it had been crushed in a motorcycle crash.
    Each piece of data and metadata narrowed the focus, disambiguating whole exabytes held on the servers in the football-pitch sized data room in the basement. She spun her web around that central fact of his name, adding and deleting strands until she had a sturdy and reliable net of information with which she could start filtering. Dozens of algorithms would analyse the data that her search pulled back, comparing it against historical patterns and returning probability matches. “John Milton” alone would generate an infinitesimally small likelihood rate, so small as to be eliminated without the need for human qualification. Adding his age might nudge the percentage up a fraction. Nationality another fraction. Adding his blood group might be worth a whole percentage point. The holy grail––a fingerprint, a DNA match––well, that happened with amateurs, but not with a man like this. That wasn’t a break she was going to catch.
    She filed the selectors for approval, took another slug of coffee, applied for capacity to run a historic search of last month’s buffer––she guessed it would take a half day, even with the petaflops of processing power that could be applied to the search––and then leant back in her chair, lacing her fingers behind her head and staring at the screens.
    Control was right. Milton was a ghost and finding him through a digital footprint was going to be a very long shot. GCHQ was collecting a vast haystack of data and she was looking for the tiniest, most insignificant needle. Control must have known that. If Milton was as good as he seemed to be, he would know how to stay off the grid. The only way that he would surface was if he chose to, or if he slipped up.
    She stood, eyes closed, stretched out her arms and rolled her shoulders.
    Anna doubted John Milton was the kind of man who was prone to mistakes.
    She started to wonder if this job was a poisoned chalice.
    The sort of job that could only ever make her look bad.

 
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    20.
    FIVE IN the morning. Plato looked at the icon of Jesus Christ that he had fixed to the dashboard of his Dodge. Feeling a little self-conscious, he touched it and closed his eyes. Four days, he prayed. Please God, keep me safe for four days. Plato was not usually a prayerful man, but today he felt that it was worth a try. He had been unable to sleep all night, the worry running around in his mind, lurid dreams of what the cartel would do to him and his family impossible to quash. In the end, with the red digits on the clock radio by his bed showing three, he had risen quietly from bed so as not to disturb Emelia and had gone to check on each of his children. They